'Murica vs. America and why the World Cup team helps me reclaim my patriotism

If you’ve been living under a rock, or you were a late adopter of The Beatles because of their suggestive haircuts, then you still might be insisting that Americans will never care about soccer. Let this sink in: America has had the most fans travel to this World Cup in Brazil of any visiting country. And while Lebron and Carmelo decide what city they want to underachieve in next year, your national soccer team is currently embodying the very best of our country while inflicting panic and self-doubt in the hearts of the would-be futbol superpowers of Europe (with a nod to other New World teams that are doing the same). And if you can appreciate this sort of thing, underneath the global spotlight, they are doing it with an integrity and style that goes a long way toward distancing the country we love from ‘Murica.

Some Americans busy not caring about soccer.

‘Murica, if you’re wondering, is a highly misogynistic, nationalistic, anti-immigrant, anti-other, petty, quivering mockery of a country whose big lifestyle and stockpile of deadly force does little to cover up his sad little insecurities—insecurities that developed largely in response to the outlandish vision of his alter-ego, the United States of America.

The United States of America, on the other hand, is a beautiful yearning. She is a precious dream, tirelessly pursued if never fully realized, of a door flung wide open, saying, “Give me your tired, your poor;” come to me if your own people think you a wretch and a burden and I will give you a place and a name equal to any other. The USA is a burgeoning hope that there are no classes or castes so thoroughly at odds that they can’t stand around the same grill. It’s a notion that would be dismissed at once if it weren’t so irrepressibly delightful—that John Adams and jack-tar might even do a jig together if they could just belly-up to the same bar (those interested, check out John Beckman's American Fun, a sort of people's history alternative to the usual narrative about how our nation's identity is rooted in Calvinist princiblah, blah, blah). 

We’re not sure if ‘Murica wasn’t coddled enough as an infant or what, but he has always been afraid of this vision. The world is not a trustworthy place through his eyes. Rather than just enjoy some cantaloupe and lemonade with some new friends, he spends his time building big walls and peeking around corners to keep out some new boogeyman that’s always out to take what he has. A mess of trembling nerves, he stockpiles “defenses,” mocks the weak, despises the effeminate, and blusters aggressions until, ironically, a real enemy is created in an ever-repeated, self-fulfilling prophecy. Having made the boogeyman, ‘Murica forever points to him as proof that there was, after all, something to fear.  

‘Murica was born of the same womb as the USA. There is part of him that wants to trust the dream. But his paranoia gets the best of him. He feels he must pull the trigger or his enemy will first. His worldview becomes a mess of internal contradictions. This is the tragic comedy of a certain compatriot whose bumper sticker I marveled at yesterday. By trying to make “Pro-God” and  “Pro-Life” synonymous with “Pro-Gun” by simple proximity, he has only put them into starker relief in an unwitting satire that Voltaire or Kierkegaard could not have invented.

Needless to say, ‘Murica has no soccer team. But the USA does.

It’s been said that the reason the US soccer team is so fun to watch is because seeing them play is a glimpse into the USA in its earliest and most idealistic days before the dream had grown jaded and drunk on power and influence. This is not the side of American history that has been marred by slavery and empire building. This is an American ideal, a glimpse of the America that social reformers in 18^th and 19^th century England and France used to romanticize because, unlike their own societies, we have no “noble” or “peasant” but only persons. Here, guys with names like Dempsey, Gonzalez, Jones, Jóhannsson, and Wondolowski play side by side without thought of class or status. Here, there is no ethnic qualification to be a part of the vision. The only races that matter are the many footraces that the one will seek to win for the betterment of the many.

In soccer, on the world stage, we are not the world superpower with a knack for self-justification and a twitchy trigger finger. In soccer, we have no brand name superstars for whom the joy of the game is only as great as the next endorsement deal. In soccer, we are the America that won’t succeed on individual gifts alone, and no advantages have been handed to us by accident of birth. We’re just a scrappy group of dreamers who want to believe that the future can be different than the past.

In soccer, geo-political roles revert back a few centuries. We are entitled to nothing and privileged nothing. We are the refuse, the have-nots, the riffraff of the old world. They would just as soon see us die of exposure somewhere in the Amazon than have to expend more resources extinguishing this naïve new vision of a world without class.   

No more space needs to be wasted showing that the so-called “Christian nation” of ‘Murica was never anything but a contradiction in terms.

But the United States of America is a vision with which my Christian faith can reconcile. The two are not and never will be synonymous. My identity as a Christ follower is one that transcends nationality and reserves the right to critique my cultural narrative as I am doing now. But the reign of God vision for the world, which is my primary commitment, need not be synonymous with the ideals of my national heritage in order for the two to live in the same house. Mine is a faith that can get with the “give me your tired, your poor” narrative—that is, what’s right about the American dream—if it’s an earnest one. Mine is a faith that can work side by side with anyone, whatever their background or creed, who believes that there needs to be in this world a place where the doors are flung open wide for outcasts and miscreants, those dreamers who believe that any class distinction can be overcome and any past division “United.”

arguing with each other well

In a culture where there is a club or party or society of people who look and think just like you, no matter who you are, the neighborhood church (as distinct from the ideologically based church of which there are many) is fast becoming one of the few places left where we can form intentional community with people who aren’t exactly like us. While I myself hold very strong, often stubborn, political views, I’m grateful to serve a community of people who challenge these daily. I’m grateful because, like any mature adult, while one part of me is quite certain that I’m right about everything, another more levelheaded part of me remains skeptical that that could possibly be the case. So I require people in my life who are different. More than that, it would be lonely were I left to my own rightness with no one to argue against me.

In 20/20 hindsight it is now obvious why the church in early 20^th century Germany needed to oppose Hitler and side with the regime’s victims in order to have any resemblance to Jesus Christ. At the time though, especially in the early going as Hitler was being touted as a savior for a humiliated and depressed people, the rhetoric was veiled, and the genocide had not begun in earnest, it was not so obvious. It almost never is that obvious right at the moment that the church most needs to take its stand.

So for the theologians who signed the Barmen Declaration as early as 1934 and then for iconic Confessing Church leaders like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller, it was not the later human rights atrocities that they had to go on when they first became nervous about the so-called Third Reich; it was the level of unquestioning allegiance that the Nazis were asking of the German church.

Think about that: long before the Nazis had achieved symbolic status for all that is evil in the popular mind, it was the best and brightest among theologians who had premonitions about what would follow for the simple reason that a church which calls Jesus Lord cannot give the same allegiance to anyone else.

Bonhoeffer, especially, would reflect at length on the difficulties of discerning the times while they are unfolding, but how, nonetheless, the church’s sole allegiance to one Lord demands nothing less than an absolute commitment to Truth. A church which divides its allegiance between Jesus and, say, this party, or that leader, or some ill-defined idea of “patriotism,” will find that it lacks the resources to maintain a critical distance from “the times” that it inhabits and speak Truth into them. 

This is why it so critical that any church worth its salt learn how to do conflict well, neither avoiding it nor practicing it in destructive ways.  In short, we need to learn how to argue with each other. Anyone who isn’t secure enough to do conflict well will inevitably gravitate toward the likeminded faction that most resembles his or herself. And regardless of whether it be liberal, conservative, educated, uneducated, or what have you, a likeminded faction will be fundamentally incapable of “discerning the times” because it will have nothing to compare against its own self-serving biases and motivations in its search for Truth in a given context.

In our culture, a church community that lacks the capacity for conflict is generally a community that has sacrificed its pursuit of Truth in favor of a shallow atmosphere of amiability or niceness. A church where conflict simply isn’t allowed is a church where a serious thing like Truth can’t really be entertained because it will forever be sidestepping real conversation about guns, wars, and incarceration for fleshless pieties and bloodless small talk.

I assume here that there is a big difference between creative disagreement for the sake of a community’s soul and destructive conflict where each tries to assert his or herself over against the community.    

My congregation is a mishmash of socioeconomic classes, cultural experiences, political views, and so on. I often say that the reason we can all come together under the same roof despite ourselves is that we’re not gathered together around a belief system but a dinner invite. Here, I’m not in community with the person next to me because we both read 1 Corinthians the same way or believe the same things about school funding but because we both received the same party invite from one whom we each address as Lord (and neither of us made a decision to have it sent to our address). We may both hold deeply serious and contradictory convictions on these things of which we’re both sure Jesus himself would approve. But it would be false for either of us to pretend like that’s the reason we were invited and then refuse a beer or a game of cornhole until the guest list is pared down to look more like us.

Now here’s the next tricky party. Getting a diverse group of people together is the first and maybe even the most difficult step in the pursuit of Truth—pursuing Truth implies opening ourselves up to that which disturbs and even contradicts what we already believe—but it’s not the last step.  

The temptation of a community at this point is to so enjoy a general atmosphere of agreeableness that agreeableness itself becomes her own idol, and the serious doubts and uncomfortable questions that Truth requires are swept aside because they might disturb her.

It is an ongoing challenge for any community that has leapt the first hurdle of forming despite difference to leap the next of creating a container that can hold creative disagreement. Congenial communities that misunderstand the importance of this next step will also misunderstand that the capacity for creative disagreement is a sign of their relational strength, not weakness. I’m always congenial with strangers. It’s only close family and friends that have a strong enough bond with me that we can have creative conflict.

To creatively disagree, we have to overcome our culture’s obsessive love of comfort. I’m at a loss to think of a single historically significant moment of witness to the faith that has been comfortable for those involved. In fact, the original Greek word meaning “to witness to the resurrection” is the same from which we derive the word “martyr.” And that level of discomfort is no more desirable because you’ve anticipated it. You can only take solace in the fact that it’s True.